Organisms such as cacti and desert beetles can survive in arid environments because they've evolved mechanisms to collect water from thin air. The Namib desert beetle, for example, collects water droplets on the bumps of ...

A new transparent, bioinspired coating makes ordinary glass tough, self-cleaning and incredibly slippery, a team from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and Harvard School of Engineering ...

After a rain, the cupped leaf of a pitcher plant becomes a virtually frictionless surface. Sweet-smelling and elegant, the carnivore attracts ants, spiders, and even little frogs. One by one, they slide to their doom.

The traps of Nepenthes gracilis use heavy rain as a power source to drive a fast prey capture motion, new research from the University of Bristol has found. The findings are published this week in the journal PNAS.

In Borneo, some insectivorous bats have developed a rather intriguing relationship with carnivorous pitcher plants. The plants offer the bats a relatively cool place to roost, free of parasites and competition from other ...

Insect-eating pitcher plants temporarily 'switch off' their traps in order to lure more prey into danger, new research from the University of Bristol, UK, and the University of Cambridge, UK, has found.

An insect-eating pitcher plant teams up with ants to prevent mosquito larvae from stealing its nutrients, according to research published May 22 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Mathias Scharmann and colleagues from ...

Most of us want to swim in a lake where we can see our toes. Clear, oxygen-rich water supports not only human swimmers, but also intricate webs of animal and microbial life. That life can be disrupted when too many nutrients—from ...

(Phys.org) —When we imagine drama playing out between predators and prey, most of us picture stealthy lions and restless gazelle, or a sharp-taloned hawk latched on to an unlucky squirrel. But Ben Baiser, a post-doctoral ...